Pepys's closing words

October is already becoming "backwards month."

Calendar/Hallmark cards/local merchants tell me that now it's fall. Actually, some local merchants have been touting Hallowe'en for several months, I just saw some Thanksgiving decorations in a store yesterday, and I'm expecting the Christmas stuff to be out by next week, but that's another matter...

ANYWAY, so people tell me it's fall. All last week, here in the L.A. basin, temps have been hitting, and exceeding, 100 degrees.

And except when the day is at it's absolute hottest, I take my M.S.-ridden body outside into the heat, and ... enjoy the warmth.

I sleep through the night, get up easily, have a cup of tea, and within minutes, have to go lie down and (it feels like) go back to sleep. I tried varying the morning tea... nope. Doesn't make any difference... Wake up, then have to go back to sleep, seems to be the current "morning routine."

For the first time in weeks, I actually accomplished something yesterday. I'm scheduled to make a presentation at a conference in a week or so, and after being unable to work on it (see above, needing to sleep all the time), I got a huge amount done on the slides.  I only have a little more to do, but the end is in sight.

In the process of making the presentation, I thought of something that nobody ever told me--ever--about  the process of writing and editing one's work, and I thought, "This is great--I've got to tell my students about this!"

Oh wait. I don't have students any more.

Yeah.

Well, as my mother likes to say, nothing is ever lost... I'll get it to my former students, and to the students I have yet to meet, somehow.

But not today.

Because... I gotta go lie down. Now.

"And so to bed," as Samuel Pepys closed his own diary entries.

Hundreds of years later... those words still work just fine. Me, I'll take "still work just fine," just a little later today.